I don't have to compete in the charts. I can just be myself as a musician, a songwriter and play with the musicians that I really love.
While I was writing 'The Big Girls,' I had to take a big breath each morning and calm myself sufficiently to once again enter that world. But friends tell me that it is the only thing that really interests me. They say that I like to be upset.
With age, you see people fail more. You see yourself fail more. How do you keep that fearlessness of a kid? You keep going. Luckily, I'm not afraid to make a fool of myself.
I think of myself more as a workhorse actor. It will be hot and cold and up and down, but no one will kick me out of the business.
Readers in general are not fond of dialect, and I don't blame them. I've read books myself that I've had to put down because sounding out every speech gave me a headache.
I was fed up with the situation I found myself in in the 1960s. I didn't like being a barrister's wife and going out to dinner with other professional people and dealing with middle class life. It seemed claustrophobic.
I read reviews and consider myself pretty 'plugged in' to the literary cosmos, yet one of the things I love best about book-touring is the opportunity to compare notes with favorite booksellers around the country. I always come home with books by authors I'd never heard of - or books I've read about but didn't realize I might love.
I'm so hard on myself. I play these sketches in my computer for friends and they say 'Gee whiz, the vocal's beautiful.' I hear, 'It needs to be better.'
I consider myself a poet first and a musician second. I live like a poet and I'll die like a poet.
From the vertigo, I found out how far I can push myself physically and also mentally.
I don't know what to do with myself between films. I end up doing unhealthy things like shopping or drinking. I'm pretty schizophrenic about it.
Like, I get along with everybody. I respect everybody, but at the same time, I carry myself with an aura that demands respect, too.
I like facts and data because they help me think clearly, beyond the cultural messages that I ingest unwittingly, and sometimes find myself regurgitating almost unconsciously.
My goal all along has just been to work and support myself. I've been really lucky to walk away from the 'Twilight' series unscathed. Somebody asked me recently what it's like to be a star. I thought that was the strangest question. If you saw my day-to-day life, the word 'star' just doesn't apply.
I've always been able to laugh at myself.
I've never seen myself as a pop singer. I grew up listening to gospel, soul and rock. My approach to pop is that, when I was doing my album, I wanted to have raw, genuine lyrics, but wanted it to be easy to process.
Great storytellers in the past would go to an unknown land and return to tell the stories they've found. Those were also journeys into their inner psyches and that's still true today. An actor, a writer, does that as if saying, 'Here's what I've discovered about myself and about the world I'm in. I would like to share this with you.'
I am my own cheerleader. I am the one who puts my goals, who pushes myself to get to the next goal. I don't have someone next to me saying, 'Here you go, now do this, it's your next step, go for it.'
I don't want to associate myself with any specific group of politicians.
I think of myself as a fairly logical, scientific and somewhat reserved person. Maura Isles, the Boston medical examiner who appears in five of my books, is me. Almost everything I use in describing her, from her taste in wine to her biographical data, is taken from my own family. Except I don't have a serial killer as a mother!
The first chance I had to go to Japan, which was in the early nineties, I went to a Noh play. I thought, 'This is very, very slow.' I noticed lots of people falling asleep. I didn't really know what was going on; I was getting a little sleepy myself. Then the more I studied it, the more fascinated I got.
I consider myself not a conservative libertarian but a radical '60s libertarian.
I have two children myself. I always laugh; they have you playing mothers pretty early, us women. You look at the television, the mothers get younger and younger, and the children get older and older, and you start to wonder when these people had these children. Were they breeding when they were 12?
I've been so entwined with technology since I was about 15, recording myself and multitracking and producing things on my own.
When I'm in the U.K. I find myself using a lot of Britishisms.
I write, or used to write, to explain to myself situations I couldn't otherwise solve or understand. Meditation comes very naturally to me.
I try to have fun; I try to inject myself into my work and have a good time along the way and not lose sight of who I am, and who my friends are, and all of these things that treating it like a business might hinder. I try to keep that hobby mentality.
I could make a whole album with no one else involved at all. It would be a total, unadulterated expression of myself. Because whenever you have others playing on a project, their influence becomes a part of it.
I watch what I eat. I'm careful with exercise. I do enough to try to stay healthy, but I don't overdo, and I pace myself... Most important of all though, I try to think healthy thoughts.
One of my main wishes in wanting to write about my mother was to explore the impact of her death on my life, explore our relationship, think about the different versions of myself that I was with and without her. I also had the really strong wish to bring her to life for my children, who were born after she was gone.
I like to call myself a 360-degree artist. I'm a musician, but I have other things I do, too.
A thing that I'm always worried about doing is putting an image of myself on my Instagram or somewhere else that looks perfect, because that's not who I am, and that's not what I want to preach.
In the beginning, I was frightened to death of going solo. Especially when doing live shows, I was so used to my brothers being next to me. It felt like the crowd was just looking at me, waiting for me to either mess up or prove myself.
I like to create stuff. I like to express myself through jokes.
Writing songs out of my faith was a real natural progression. I grew up singing in my dad's choir and singing with my family. Christian music became the music that I identified myself with and was a way that I expressed my faith. Even at a public school I would take my Christian music in and play it for my friends.
My mom is just authentically herself all the time. She loves herself. She loves her sense of humor. She brings people in when she talks. She brings people in when she laughs. Watching her, I think that that's when I first learned and was encouraged to be myself and to sort of love and live in that way.
